I suppose for whatever reason I actively welcome being put down, something which perhaps goes back to my upbringing - that accusation of not being worthy which could be laid at one's door.
Paul Muldoon
7
I think it's too simple to say that violence equals energy; people have said that along the way. Violence is debilitating as much as anything else.
Paul Muldoon
8
It seems to me the structure of the Quartets is too imposed.
Paul Muldoon
9
It's not as if I'm trying to write crossword puzzles to which one might find an answer at the back of the book or anything like that.
Paul Muldoon
10
Last year I was a judge for a prize in England, the T.S. Eliot Prize, so I read everything that was published in England last year.
Paul Muldoon
11
Living at that pitch, on that edge, is something which many poets engage in to some extent.
Paul Muldoon
12
Obviously one of the things that poets from Northern Ireland and beyond - had to try to make sense of was what was happening on a day-to-day political level.
Paul Muldoon
13
On the other hand, at some level the mass of unresolved issues in Northern Ireland does influence the fact that there are so many good writers in the place.
Paul Muldoon
14
One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.
Paul Muldoon
15
That's one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were.
Paul Muldoon
16
The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.
Paul Muldoon
17
The teachers I had myself, the best of them were quite extraordinary, and really did inspire one into reading, or indeed, writing.
Paul Muldoon
18
What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up.
Paul Muldoon
19
Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect.
Paul Muldoon
20
Your average pop song or film is a very sophisticated item, with very sophisticated ways of listening and viewing that we have not really consciously developed over the years - because we were having such a good time.
Paul Muldoon
